Spot will periodically have a white, milky liquid coming from his eyes. I asked my vet about this -- my vet used to raise guinea pigs -- and she said she had a pig once with the same white liquid coming from his eye. She tried to research the subject but couldn&acute;t find any information on it, so she took a sample of the liquid and put it under a microscope. She said it was not infectious, just a milky substance.

Has anyone else had this kind of experience. Do you know if these milky "tears" are normal?

It&acute;s OK, quite normal. The milky liquid is produced to cleanse the eye, often when a pig is grooming itself or after a bath.

I freaked out the first time I saw it, thinking it was some awful eye infection, but it&acute;s OK. Thick goopy discharge or dried crusty stuff around the eye is another matter, requiring a vet visit. It may indicate an eye infection or herald an imminent URI.

Last edited by pigpal on Mon Mar 25, 2002 1:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The first couple times it happened, I was in a dimly lit room and by the time I got him into bright light to check it out, it was gone. My husband thinks I&acute;m overly protective of the little guys so didn&acute;t believe there was any milky stuff - "just a reflection of the light or soemthing." Then one day, I scooped the milky liquid in my fingernail and showed him. See, I&acute;m not out of my mind.

It&acute;s nice when something is normal and not a problem. Glad the answer to your question was so easy.

I remember my mother telling me to keep my hands away from my eyes. Even now, I notice if I&acute;ve tried to clean the corner of one eye with a fingernail, I will have more problems the next day with even more goop -- but it goes away if I use the corner of a clean tissue instead. I do think our hands and fingernails carry quite a bit of bacteria.

Last edited by Lynx on Mon Mar 25, 2002 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Standard info like that wasn&acute;t available before the net. Eva&acute;s site was the first I ever saw that explained it. Before the Net, I knew about it but didn&acute;t know exactly what it was and didn&acute;t worry about. I assumed it was normal since the white fluid disappeared. I didn&acute;t bother really researching it until one of ours got a plugged tear duct and the white fluid didn&acute;t disappear. And then she kept getting small infections which changed the colour of the fluid. But until then I didn&acute;t worry about it. All I knew was it showed up whenever they groomed.

For general husbandry questions, my vet calls me. She&acute;s never had a pig as a pet so this isn&acute;t info she knows off the top of her head. The info in her books is based on lab animals. When I was asking her about a calcium supplement she suggested cheese - half seriously. All she knew was that cheese was a readily available source of calcium. I scolded her and she laughed. Now she knows(probably already did, deep in her heart) - cheese isn&acute;t good for pigs even as a treat. As for the minutia of why pigs shouldn&acute;t eat it - just isn&acute;t part of her frame of reference. Diseases, medications, things with precise info based on other animals that she can extrapolate - she&acute;s brilliant at. That&acute;s her realm of expertise. Diagnostics is a particular talent.